Collaborative Research Centre in Literary Studies approved
The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio ‘Historical and Transcultural Narratology’ at the University of Freiburg. Within this project, researchers are investigating narratives and narrative practices in various historical and cultural contexts. The spokesperson for the Collaborative Research Centre is Prof. Dr Eva von Contzen, Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg.
The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding a new Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio (SFB/TRR) at the University of Freiburg. The TRR Historical and Transcultural Narratology will receive just under ten million euros over four years. Within this project, researchers will examine narratives and narrative practices in various historical and cultural contexts. To this end, the researchers will test and further develop methods from the digital humanities. The TRR’s spokesperson is Prof. Dr Eva von Contzen, Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, whose research focuses on medieval literature, historical narrative studies and literary theory. The Universities of Bochum and Bonn are also involved.
“We are delighted to have secured funding for this new Collaborative Research Centre. The approval is a major success for our university and is a testament to the excellent research being carried out by our academics in the important field of the humanities,” says Rector Prof. Dr Kerstin Krieglstein.
A new historical-transcultural narrative theory
People have always told stories. Across all eras and cultures, narratives have played a vital role in social cohesion. The new TRR Historical and Transcultural Narratology examines pre-modern narratives – that is, those from antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern period – drawn from various cultural contexts. The TRR will test and further develop methods from the digital humanities in order to anchor comparative narrative research more firmly in the digital realm. For its research, the TRR utilises digital and AI-based methods, ranging from prompt engineering to more advanced AI architectures. The researchers’ aim is to develop a new historical-transcultural narrative theory that overcomes the narrow focus of current narrative theories on Western and modern or postmodern traditions. This new narrative theory is intended to encompass diverse historical narrative formats and functions from various cultural contexts. In doing so, the researchers will open up new avenues for comparative, interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies on a global scale.
“The Collaborative Research Centre promises a fundamental re-examination of storytelling in the past from a comparative perspective,” says spokesperson von Contzen. “The participating researchers come from 16 different disciplines, including Egyptology, Korean Studies, Theology, Classical Studies and Slavic Studies. We are exploring questions such as how people in past cultures told stories, in what contexts, for what purposes, and what their stories were like.”
The research findings are intended to facilitate a comprehensive historical and cross-cultural comparison of storytelling from a global perspective and to offer a fundamentally new insight into the origins, diversity and functions of narrative forms. Researchers from the consortium of the Universities of Freiburg, Bochum and Bonn will work closely with the Digital Humanities Lab at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Freiburg and the Bonn Centre for Digital Humanities.
DFG press release: https://www.dfg.de/de/aktuelles/neuigkeiten-themen/pressemitteilungen/2026/pressemitteilung-nr-15
Contact:
University and Science Communications
University of Freiburg
0761/203-4302
kommunikation@zv.uni-freiburg.de
Weitere Informationen:
https://uni-freiburg.de/en/collaborative-research-centre-in-literary-studies-approved/
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